We’re (Done) Hiring
UPDATE: We’re done hiring for this semester. Welcome new sysadmins, and thanks to everyone who applied!
In the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be hiring new SCCS administrators. If you like playing around with linux, web administration, photography, etc., send us an email at staff@sccs.swarthmore.edu and we’ll organize an interview. To find out more about what we do here, check out our about page.
XBox Live & Party
For everyone and anyone who’s ever dreamed of kicking some online ass, we’ve updated our XBox Live subscription. Come down to the media pit and take advantage of the new access. ALSO! This friday (Sept 18) at 8 we’re having a party — Rock Band, Left 4 Dead, Super Smash Bros, WarCraft, StarCraft, and anything else you want. We’ll have food and drink and lots of gaming. See you then!
Online Cygnet Updated
We know you’ve been anxious for us to update the online Cygnet for the past year; well, you can finally put your anxieties to rest, slow your anxious breathing, and get that blood pressure down a bit: the Cygnet is now up-to-date (except off-campus and abroad students, which will be added…in the near future).
Return of the Mailing Lists
As some of you have noticed, all of the mailing lists were down for a while. The problem was eventually traced to a lack of communication between the program responsible for distributing email to the lists, and another program it was relying on to filter out spam. This has been fixed, and the lists are now working again.
During the period that email was coming in to the lists but none was being sent out, an enormous queue of messages built up. After some deliberation we decided to let the server chew through them instead of throwing away all of those messages. Since, undoubtedly, many of these messages are not legitimate, this should explain any sudden spike in spam in the next few days. We are still working hard on better spam filtering. Importantly, as the server frantically distributes the tens of thousands of messages waiting in the queue, any new messages that are sent will start at the end of the line and appear not to go through. But the lists are not down — things will go through eventually. According to my calculations, the queue should be processed by Wednesday 8/19, at which point email should flow normally.
Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
LDAP Transition Complete, SCCS is back up!
We’ve just completed our transition to LDAP, and have gotten all of our services back online! These changes should be transparent currently, but we have plans for auto-complete in mail and a few other improvements made possible with LDAP. We think we’ve got it working perfectly, but if you find any problems, please let us know!
Announcing: Concierge
It is perhaps a well-kept secret that SCCS has a lot of resources to offer to the community that are hidden under Tarble. With the arrival of our slick cabinet, the Media Pit is finally unlocked and available on a first-come/first-serve basis unless it’s reserved, which is done through email to staff@sccs.swarthmore.edu. Reservations of camera equipment are likewise done through email.
This system could stand improvement. Currently if you want to reserve something, there are too many round-trips over email: you have to find out if it’s available, how long you can have it, when you can pick it up, et cetera. It would be nice if there were some way, maybe a convenient web interface, where one could browse through the near future and check out what is available. Perhaps one could even put a reservation in motion right from this interface.
Good news: rather late in the semester, and very much past its due date, SCCS is launching Concierge, a brand new shiny interface for doing exactly that. We urge anyone who wants to reserve equipment in the future to use this instead of sending us an email directly.
Like any other new software, Concierge certainly has quite a few bugs and rough edges. There is a link in the upper right corner of every page for reporting bugs (note: bad explanations and missing features count as bugs). Please bear with us as we improve Concierge!
Major Cleanup
After a marathon five-hour work session in SCCS yesterday, a whole bunch of new things are up.
We’ve installed our security system! With four cameras that can see in the dark, we’ll be able to watch you live from any computer anywhere! This should allow us to continue to offer our services without much fear of theft, and will help us get our video game system live.
There was a major leak in Tarble, and workbox just finished repairing it. The foul odor that was seeping through the entire basement is slowly vanishing, and is hardly noticeable outside of our server room.
We have an enormous stack of equipment in our lounge. If you want anything from it … it is yours!
New Mac Pro: Kestrel
Today, SCCS added a new computer to our flock—a Mac Pro.
Stats
One 16x SuperDrive
500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
2GB (2 x 1GB) (We’ll be adding more soon)
Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB (Two dual-link DVI)
The Name
We ran a vote with a run-off. The three finalists were Roadrunner (w/ 6 votes), Puffin (w/ 3 votes), and Kestrel (w/ 4 votes). The final voting gave us:
Roadrunner: Kofi and Trilok
Puffin: Jonah, Andrew, Ryan
Kestrel: Dougal, Alex, Miles, and Will
New Camera
SCCS has acquired a second digital SLR, the Canon EOS 40D:
As is always true with SCCS equipment, it will be available for loan to any current student. It can be borrowed along with one of our two lenses (a telephoto and a wide-angle), our tripod, or our external flash system.
Recent Issues
Some of you have been having trouble with posting to mailing lists of late. We believe we’ve solved the problem; if it happens again, let us know (staff@sccs).
As a mostly-unrelated issue, there was some downtime this afternoon. There seems to have been a hard drive-related problem with our main server — don’t worry, all the data is still there, plus we have backups. We’re still investigating, but hopefully this won’t happen again.
And another, totally-unrelated thing: I’ve changed the webmail link to go to roundcube rather than squirrelmail, since it’s a much nicer interface. There’s still another link to squirrelmail underneath it, for those of you who prefer it.